


staying power

by deniigiq



Series: Inimitable Verse [11]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Anxiety, Challenges, Construction, Doing their fucking best alright?, F/M, Gen, He re-enters Ball of Stress Mode, M/M, Moving, Multi, Peter is promoted against his will, Secret Identity, Socially Inept Scientists, Stress, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team Red, Team as Family, Workplace, eventually, workplace drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-02-07 10:05:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18618406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: Peter was making a new rule: no more pistol whipping. For anyone. He was cancelling it for everyone.(Peter and his lab team are assigned to handle the opening of a new lab. They are woefully unprepared. In the meantime, it seems like everyone in the world knows something Peter doesn't.)Discontinued.





	1. drop that shoe boy

**Author's Note:**

> DID YOU MISS ME? (lol, see it's funny because I will not stop fucking posting) 
> 
> Anyways, we are moving this verse back towards Peter again. References to stressful workplace situations below. Please do what you need to to look after yourselves as always.
> 
> Summary might change when more of the fic gets written.

He was cooing at the laminator when Saanvi stuck her head in the room and told him he was being summoned. She did not judge him for the cooing. She’d done much cooing in her time.

He thanked her and commenced bestowing even greater enthusiasm upon the machine.

It wasn’t that it was old. It was just how things were.

The interns had built a small shrine to the laminator gods by the paperclips on the short table next to the beast. It was made out of stacked ramen blocks and granola bars. If you weren’t sure of your luck or had found yourself bearing witness to the trials of the coworker in front of you trying to use the machine, you could drop a pen or a binder clip or some change—whatever the fuck you had in your pockets honestly—into the plastic cup in the center as a sacrifice.

Mr. Stark called this paganism and periodically swept through the building like some kind of rationalist colonizer, destroying these tiny shrines, but in time they always sprung back up.

Peter loved them.

Little homes of belief and chaos riddled through the sterile offices on every floor.

On his way out of the copy room, lime-green laminated safety instructions in hand, he dropped a couple of pennies into the mouth of the solo cup. They rang out against the faces of a small pile of their fellows resting at the bottom.

 

 

It was not unusual to be called down to Mr. Stark’s office; everyone knew that Peter was one of his favorite employees and frequently one of his favorite pin cushions. Between him and the guys in Lab 80 and the weird chemical engineer who spoke only in tongues that Mr. Stark had hired about a month previous, people were always being called down to Mr. Stark’s office. It was, however, unusual to be called up to Ms. Potts’s office. Unusual and unwelcome.

There, there be dragons.

As far as the lab researchers and managers were concerned, going upstairs was the first step towards the end of your career. You only went upstairs after you’d done something less than positive. Like setting off the whole building’s sprinkler system during an international summit. Or ordering a year’s supply of hydrochloric acid without getting written clearance.

Peter had been in Ms. Potts’s office a handful of times in his life, most of which had occurred as Spiderman. This was probably his fourth or fifth time, and only the second as Peter Parker.

His stomach hurt.

He had to wait outside the door on a couch which pretended to be comfortable but felt like sitting on a plastic rock. It brought back visceral memories of sitting in front of Principal Morita’s solid wood office door back in highschool. Running through his story a thousand times before the door opened and the smell of wood and dry erase markers beckoned him in.

He ran through all the shit he’d done wrong that week. It hadn’t been that much—not shit he thought Ms. Potts would ever have noticed anyways. Like, yeah okay, he’d ordered the branded post-its this time around, and fine, he’d let his interns off fifteen minutes early for the past couple Fridays, but that wasn’t the kind of thing that worked its way up to CEO level, right?

Unless he’d started a trend or something? Unless everyone was letting the interns go early now and they weren’t hitting their hours?

“Peter?” the secretary asked.

“Hmm?”

“You’re up to bat.”

Oh, perfect.

 

 

The first thing Peter noticed when he entered the office was that he was facing, not Ms. Potts, but Mr. Stark, slouched low and spinning in circles in her desk chair. He almost sighed in relief but caught himself. Ms. Potts would never fire him herself if it came to that; no, she’d make Mr. Stark do it.

Mr. Stark stopped in his spinning and blinked at Peter owlishly from behind his glasses for a second.

“The prodigal son returns,” he said. Then waved at the seat in front of the desk. “Sit, sit.”

He sat.

The Spidey Sense hummed in the nape of his neck, distrusting. Peter was pretty sure that touching Ms. Potts’s desk was a no-no, spousal privilege notwithstanding. Mr. Stark showed a stunning lack of care in this.

“Pete, me and Pep have been talking.”

Oh _shit._ Goddamnit. Fuck.

Yep, okay, this was fine. He’d been waiting for this day. For the other shoe to finally drop. For Mr. Stark to come to his senses and see that having another superperson working for him was at least two HR code violations at the same time.

“Been thinking big picture, Pete,” Mr. Stark continued, “Thinking about your future here.”

Ahhhhhhhh.

Well, the good news was that he had recently taken home his office plant out of concern that someone was stealing its leaves for unsanctioned experiments in one of the bio labs. He was pretty sure he could fit the rest of his shit into the banker’s box he kept under his desk for documents that needed to be shredded.

“What do you think, kid? How do you see your future at SI?”

That was a trick fucking question if Peter had ever heard one. Any answer in the positive would suggest that he perceived that future to continue at this very institution. Any answer in the negative would be taken either as permission for release or as a snub against the company.

Tricky, tricky.

Sticky, sticky.

“I haven’t thought much about it, sir,” he said.

Mr. Stark hummed. He nudged open the corner of a little box on Ms. Potts’s desk and then dropped it closed in disinterest.

“Well, let’s say that you did—that you were thinking about it presently, as in, right now, as we speak. What might that look like to you, Pete?”

“I guess, it might be more of the same,” Peter admitted cautiously. “More lab managing. Orders. Signs. Audits. Flashlights, you know. That kind of thing.”

Mr. Stark hummed again and stared up at the ceiling with his fingers woven together on top of his diaphragm.

“Yeah, that’s about what I figured,” he said. Peter got the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that this had somehow been the wrong answer.

“Pete, do you know how much you’ve grown since you first came here? And I’m not talking just height.”

“Uh, no?” And he didn’t want to?

“So much, kiddo. So much.”

What did that mean? Was this good or bad?

“I mean, every day, I’m just blown away with you, Pete. You know that?”

He did now. More importantly, what did that _mean?_

“But me and Pepper were talking, and you know, I don’t want you to stagnant here, kiddo.”

Ah. Right. So this was how they were  going to frame this. If Peter had had to pick, he couldn’t say he’d have done the same, but there wasn’t really any going back now. What a bummer. Actually, no.

What a fucking disaster. He started doing some mental math around his savings, figuring that if he started sending out applications as soon as he got home, he had enough saved up for a couple of months of unemployment before things would start to get a little touch-and-go. Maybe this was time to get back into photography? Maybe he could dig out the camera and do some freelancing after he sent out the first round of resumes.

“Peter? Hello? Earth to Parker, come in, Parker.”

And if things got really bad, May would probably let him move back in for a while. She’d never admit that she found the apartment to be lonely with only her in it.

“Peter. You’re freakin’ me out here, buddy. Are you listening?”

He definitely couldn’t apply to Oscorp now, he’d well and truly burned that bridge. But there was still Pym Industries. They were more physics folks, but he could probably find something in there. There was also always Horizon Labs. He wasn’t sure he was good enough to get into that place yet, but there was no time like the present for finding out. Then, there was MJ’s lab, The Institute for the Advancement of Bio-Technology. And on top of that, there were all sorts of university labs seeking researchers and fellows all over.

If he put his mind to it, he could probably have a new job by next month. 

“PETER.”

“Hmm?”

“Jesus, kid. Thought I’d lost you there for a second. I said, what do you say?”

To what? The panic attack he was about to have in the elevator?

Mr. Stark stared at him in a way which made the wrinkles in his forehead especially prominent.

“The panic attack? Pete, what the hell are you talking about? Did you—wait. Did you think I was firing you?”

Uh, _duh_. They were presently sitting in the firing room. And Mr. Stark was asking firing questions and saying firing things.

Mr. Stark said nothing for a long, uncomfortable period of time, during which Peter tried to figure out when it would be appropriate to stand up and tell him that he was just going to collect his things. A good ten seconds ticked by and he couldn’t take it anymore. As soon as his knees popped into standing, though, Mr. Stark, said “Boy, sit down.”

And he sat down. It wasn’t a negotiable tone. Mr. Stark took off his glasses and mashed a hand against his face.

“Pete, you gotta stop zoning out when people are talking to you. I’m gonna say it again, alright? Are you listening?”

Yes, he was listening.

“Okay, so. Like I said, Queen’s College has offered us some lab space on campus for the bio-phys department. I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but we thought we’d take the space before they rescinded the offer. Haven’t seen the grounds or the blue prints myself, but allegedly it’s viable.

Pep and I were thinking that it would be good to get the lab over there started by some of our veteran managers. If it’s gonna work, we’ve gotta involve some students in the work. I thought that it made sense for our organic projects to move out that way, since we’ve only got two of them on right now and it’s easier to train students to work in those than it is to get them into the aero-space shit as it is. So what that means is that you, Saanvi, Leo, Himani, Bo and Avery and your teams, basically Labs 30 to 49, would move to the Queens facility for now and once we’ve got everything settled, we can swap you guys out with Labs 12 to 20, since they aren’t going to need the same amount of space you guys will in a couple years here, and the sooner we get the fire squad out of this building, the better we can all sleep at night.”

Oh.

That.

Uh. Made sense.

“Yes, that is what Pep and I thought ourselves. So, what do you say, Pete? It’s closer to home for you. You’d get a bonus of course. Could have a say in designing the new labs. There’ll be students; I know how much you love students.”

Middle schoolers, Mr. Stark. Peter loved middle school students. They just got catty after that.

“Ehn, they’re all freshmen. Anyways, we’d get you a handful of interns to torment for a year or two here and, if Queens doesn’t throw us out on our faces before then, then maybe we could look into setting up some internships more like the kind you had with me. So? Sound viable?”

Honestly? No. Absolutely not. Peter could imagine fourteen potential pitfalls with this plan right now in this very chair. But to say so would be beyond ungrateful. Mr. Stark had done so much for him over the last few years. It wouldn’t be right if Peter just took and gave nothing back. So, yeah, okay; setting up a new lab cluster sounded exactly like the kind of thing his therapist was telling him to avoid agreeing to. But it would be closer to home and he’d get a bonus _and_ it was an opportunity for professional development. Peter hadn’t set up a program or lab before. He knew how they ran. He just didn’t know how to build that infrastructure himself.

In the inevitable future of him leaving Stark Industries, that seemed like more or less important experience to have under his belt.

“Think about it, Pete. Have a chat with the others, you’re the last I talked to. See how y’all feel and get back to me by Friday, yeah?”

It was Wednesday. That wasn’t much time.

“Yeah?”

Fuck. He couldn’t—he couldn’t say no. This was Mr. Stark talking.

“Of course,” he said. “I’ll talk to the others.”

 

 

He managed not to sprint to the elevator but once inside, he did half-gasp-half-scream at FRIDAY to get him back to his lab.

His sneakers shrieked against the linoleum as he gunned it towards the communal breakroom. He almost crushed the doorframe under his hands when he threw himself into it and gasped,

“SAANVI?”

Half of his team, mixed in with a couple of Leo’s kids stared back at him like a bunch of owls.

“SAANVI???” He tried again.

“She’s in her office?” One of the interns offered him back. He pointed at them to express his gratitude because he couldn’t make his face do it at that moment and then threw himself back in the hall. He managed to hear a few of the researchers asking,

“He’s the third one, what is Ms. Potts _doing_ to them?”

 

 

He opened Saanvi’s door a little harder than intended (much harder than intended) and cried her name just as she cried his. The mutual pain and conflict in her face was beyond comforting. She picked herself up and met him halfway for a hug over her desk.

“I don’t _wanna_ go,” she whined like a kid in his shoulder.

“Me either,” he confided.

Saanvi pulled back and looked up at him with deeply bent eyebrows.

“Do we have to?”

“I don’t know how to say no,” Peter told her.

“Fuck, that’s what Leo said. Avery, too. None of us know how to say no.”

“Maybe that’s why they chose us? Maybe they knew we’re all too socially incompetent to refuse?”

“Oh my god, you’re so right—but what the fuck are we gonna do, Peter?”

“I don’t know.”

“OH MY GOD.”

Ah.

Thank Jesus for Himani Gupta. Her finding them meant that they didn’t have to go open every door on the west side of the hall looking for her.

“GUYS.”

They _knew_.

“I CAN’T SAY NO. _GUYS._ ”

Lol. Same.

“WE HAVE TO SAY YES OR I’LL DIE.”

Oh, _amazing_. Peter loved it when other people made decisions for the group.

 

 

All the researchers and interns were freaking out now since none of their lab coordinators were capable of being normal human beings and had all crowded around Saanvi’s office door within plain sight to panic over what was happening.

Himani informed them all in peak Himani anxiety tones that they were saying ‘yes’ and she would hear no other argument right now or else she’d pack up her shit and go back to her dad’s restaurant. Her fragile mental state couldn’t handle any other alternatives. This was fair, reasonable, and understandable given that it was more or less all of their lines of thinking at that moment.

Now that all six of them were standing in a circle, violently chewing their nails, refusal had gone from an uncomfortable possibility to unthinkable.

“But we can’t set up a lab,” Avery pointed out. She was always kind of pale, but right then she was practically see-through. “We can’t even manage the labs we do have. How the fuck are we supposed to start from the ground?”

“Has anyone even seen the space? Do we know if it’s even a lab to begin with? What if it’s just like, a warehouse?” Bo interjected.

“Mr. Stark claims the space is viable,” Peter offered.

“Mr. Stark built the Ironman suit in a _cave_ , Peter. Viable means fuck all to him. I’m talking about for us normal humans.”

Yes, good point, well made.

“You think we can maybe go see the space first?” Leo tried. “At least then we’ll know what we’re getting into?”

Another excellent point.

“I dunno about you guys, but I’ve only got ‘til Friday to decide,” Avery said.

“There is no deciding,” Himani interrupted, “It has been decided. We are doing it. It’s just a matter of how badly.”

DAMN. Himani was on _fire_ today.

“So what do we do? Just say ‘yes?’ Just send a collective email and say ‘yes?’ What about our staff?” Saanvi pointed out.

They all looked down the hall and finally noticed that the entire floor had gathered outside the breakroom to stare at them all in horror.

“Are we getting fired?” a brave soul called their way.

“Someone _do something_ ,” Avery murmured out of the corner of her mouth at the others. Bo took the leap for all of them, throwing a hand up and waving their arm in a gesture probably intended to be comforting.

“Don’t mind us,” they shouted down the hall, “We’re just talking shipments.”

Even a dead dog would know that they weren’t just talking shipments. But Bo had tried, bless them.

“Classified shipments,” Peter called immediately after. May as well tape a ‘do not ask’ sign on it while they were at it.

“You guys are so full of shit,” Alverez called back. “Just tell us, are we getting fired?”

“No one’s getting fired,” Leo told them all resoundingly. “As soon as we know more about what’s happening, we’ll let you all know, alright?”

Was it comforting? No. But it was at least the truth. They couldn’t give their staff much more than that.

 

 

 

 


	2. bahn mi

There was a little Vietnamese joint right across the street from Peter’s apartment and if he added up the number of sandwiches and cups of coffee he bought there on a monthly basis, he wouldn’t have been surprised if it worked out to be something like a fourth of their rent.

He stopped by later that night to soften the shitty day he’d just had in addition to the one he was about to have in the morning. He ordered a meatball sandwich, hold the cilantro. Dan, the place’s resident teenager, had told Peter once that his mother took this as an insult to her cooking, but said that he understood that Peter couldn’t help his genes. Peter hadn’t slept in 72 hours by that point and his Spiderman brain told him that the appropriate response to this was to climb over the counter and go apologize profoundly to Mrs. Pham in the kitchen for being culturally insensitive.

She’d been surprised, but ultimately pleased by the groveling and had sat Peter down in the backroom with her and fed him cilantro until he was dying like some kind of torturous immersion therapy.

It didn’t work.

But Mrs. Pham had given him an A for effort and now allowed him his cilantro-less sandwiches with an air of satisfaction.

While he was waiting for his sandwich with a few other bored souls that night, Ned called and said that MJ had told him about the current Situation.

“I mean, have you even seen the location?” Ned asked.

“We couldn’t get any blueprints that weren’t from 1964, so we had to google maps that shit,” Peter sighed. “Can’t tell anything from the satellite, although _allegedly_ it is not condemned. So, you know, on a scale of one to ten here, at least we know we’re starting at a solid 1.”

“Dude,” Ned said, “Did Stark say anything about equipment? Do you guys have to order that shit or can you go without it for a minute?”

“Yeah, no. He ain’t said shit. He’s been helpfully fucking invisible this whole afternoon. I think I’m gonna ask for a set of hardhats just in case.”

“How many hardhats are we talking here?”

“Uuuuuh. Well, six of us, 6 to 12 folks per team. Ave and Bo share one, so I dunno. Something like 50?”

“What the fuck. He should at least give you guys until the end of the month.”

“Nah, if it comes to it, I’ll just steal ‘em. Nate on 67 is hoarding shit again.”

One of the guys waiting next to Peter lifted his head from his phone and gave him a judgmental eyebrow. Peter gave him a bored glance which he hoped signaled for the man to mind his own goddamn business.

“Not for the helmet shipment, Peter,” Ned clarified, “For choosing to actually do this. I mean, what if you get there and there’s like, no running water?”

“What, in New York? No, there’ll be at least one sink, I’m sure.”

“What if there isn’t, though?” Ned insisted. “And even if there was, there’s 50 of you, you can’t all share one sink.”

“No, but by god we will try.”

“Peter just say no. This is outrageous.”

No, it absolutely was.

“Can’t. Himani told us that if anyone says no, she’s moving to Sweden and getting married to the first man she sees. I can’t have that shit hanging over my head for the rest of my life.”

Dan waved his paper-wrapped baguette at him at the register and Peter wordlessly stepped forward to take it.

“That girl is always holding herself hostage. Shit’s not healthy,” Ned grumbled in his ear.

“I fucking love her. She’s like my id in human form.”

“ _Peter_.”

“Come again, Spiderman!” Dan’s cheery voice said just as the door closed with a jingle behind Peter.

He stopped. Looked behind him at the glass door. On the other side, Dan was handing out sandwiches to some of the other folks who’d been waiting too.

Had he--?

Was that--?

No.

A joke. Yeah. A joke.

“Peter? Hey man, you still there?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly, putting the phone back to his ear. “Yeah, no. Sorry, go on.”

 

 

He filed Dan’s joke away in the back of his head for the time being because he had bigger problems and they involved tracking down some motherfucking blueprints. He almost overrode the whole thing by calling up Wade and offering him fifty bucks for the job, but his better nature caught up to him before he could reach for his phone. Mr. Stark would not appreciate Wade’s fingerprints on anything SI-related.

He resolved to sleep on it and see what he could scrounge up in the morning.

 

 

Morning came and went with a fire alarm, followed by a gas alarm, followed by a full-building evacuation which really put a dent in all that time Peter and his five compatriots had to do some logistics research. It wasn’t a complete waste, though. Since the day before, it seemed the staff from labs 30 to 49 had realized the plight they were collectively in, even if they didn’t completely understand it. They appeared to have banded together to start practicing working as a unit.

They all huddled around the Lab Manager Dream Team as they typed frantically into tablets and phones in the courtyard, trying to find out as much information on Queens College’s campus and infrastructure as they could on half and quarter screens. Peter looked up and noted a perceivable lack of shenanigans. He did a head count of his staff and found that, for once, they were all present and accounted for. Ave and Bo saw him doing this and did the same.

In the end, shockingly, it worked out that their whole imminent team of 54 was within thirty yards of their designated area.

Huh.

Peter had expected a greater degree of chaos than this. They must have been feeding off the managers’ moods. Uneasy. Seeking comfort in familiarity, numbers, and mutual suffering in the face of the unknown.

Bautista, one of Peter’s interns from Lab 32, touched him lightly on the arm. She was the smallest of his troop. He wasn’t positive the interns would be coming with to the Queens Catastrophe yet.

“Is everything really okay, Peter?” she asked him quietly.

No. Not even a little. According to the internet, the building the Catastrophe was supposed to take place in had had a date with a wrecking ball in 1980. Given Mr. Stark’s claims of viability, Peter assumed that it had been stood up on this date. But no one could find any mention of renovations or construction happening on it since then. Not in the city’s permits or in the university’s news.

This did not bode well for any of them.

“I don’t know right now,” he said honestly, “But we’re gonna do our best and that’s all anyone can ask from us.”

Bautista’s eyes flickered down for a second, then she looked back up and gave Peter a tight smile.

“Okay, if you say so,” she said.

 

 

Peter couldn’t sleep that night because he was doing mental math about all the costs and types of equipment and contracts they were going to need to build a lab in the middle of a goddamn sinkhole. He tried stuffing himself under the covers. He tried rolling over and telling his brain to shut the fuck up. He tried opening a window and putting on cooking shows to lull him to sleep.

No dice.

At 3am, he’d had enough.

He pulled on the suit and went out on a late, solo patrol.

 

 

He ran into Little Spidey just as she was turning in for the night. She spotted him first and scampered over to bump amicably into his side.

“He lives!” she cried.

Yeah, barely.

“Woah, full face McGrump. What’s up with you?”

“The universe is punishing me for pretending to be normal,” Peter sighed. Little Spidey cocked her head at him.

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” she asked.

Ouch. Come on, girl. At least pretend to be sympathetic.

“I guess?” he said.

“You’re doing a bad job.”

Wow, thanks. He’d gathered that. Little Spidey leaned far into his line of vision. Peter suspected she was frowning behind her mask.

“What?” he asked.

“You look stressed.”

“That’s ‘cause I _am_ stressed.”

“You’re no fun when you’re stressed. Hey, did you know Bitsy joined a club a while back?”

“ _Bitsy_? What, with other humans? Is it a human club?”

“Yeah, people and everything. I think he’s sick.”

“I think he’s possessed.”

“Right???”

“We need to keep an eye on him,” Peter decided, adding Miles to the mental list of people he was casually stalking in his very little spare time. That brought the total to five: Miles, Liz Toomes from highschool, both Osborns, and his Intro to Chem professor from NYU.

Little Spidey clapped her hands in delight and agreement and decided that if Peter was going to be out, then she was going to take a shortcut home. Peter waved after her as she hurried off.

 

 

The morning brought with it a job well done in the form of two guys trying to rob a second story office now sitting in handcuffs in a holding cell. It also brought with it a massive black eye which needed more concealer than Peter currently had at his disposal.

He was making a new rule: no more pistol whipping. For anyone. He was cancelling it for everyone.

The concealer issue made him late as hell, and so lunch became a grab-and-go type of affair. He lurched into the Vietnamese place and bought a box of spring rolls to take with him on the way to work. Mrs. Pham clicked her tongue and told him he was too skinny like she did any time she was minding the register. Rather than have that argument again while he was already late, Peter grabbed another box of spring rolls and dropped it on top of the first.

She made him buy some soup, too.

He crashed into the lab and swallowed the judgmental looks of everyone else with half a granola bar. He perched himself on the arm of one of the wreck room couches by Saanvi and tried to catch up with the discussion happening there.

They were going to say ‘yes’ to Mr. Stark’s offer, but only on a conditional and temporary basis.

They didn’t want to be at this facility for more than a year, two max. They’d build the lab up, provided that, in the meantime, all project deadlines would be extended and they could have a team working at SI on those while another worked to set up the new facility. The teams would rotate, both managers and staff, so that work was equally distributed.

There was much nodding and then much typing and printing and signing and then Ave and Leo led them all in some deep breathing exercises so they didn’t shit themselves when they went up to talk to Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark.

 

 

Peter forgot sometimes, in the haze of being an employee of their company, that Ms. Potts and Mr. Stark were fairly chill people. They were audibly fighting over Mr. Stark’s latest plant-based project when the Queens Team poked their heads in the door.

Mr. Stark was saying something about currents and how plants did not feel pain, and Ms. Potts was of the opinion that _she_ felt pain when Tony electrocuted their leafy companions, to which Tony replied, ‘They’re watercress, Pep. You want me to bring in some kind of priest to bless ‘em first? ‘Cause I will if that will make you happy.’

It would make her happy.

Peter wondered sometimes what they talked about when they were at home, just the two of them.

Once the plant discussion had died down, the lab managers were allowed into the office to plead their case. Mr. Stark and Ms. Potts blinked once at them, then twice at each other and shrugged.

“Sounds good,” Mr. Stark said. “I like it. Give the papers to Marie outside and she’ll submit them to HR to amend the contracts. You can tell your staff now. Full-timers will move onto the rotation with you. Part-timers and interns will have the option to go or be reassigned.”

Ms. Potts was slightly more reserved. She put her hand on Mr. Stark’s shoulder before he stood up out of his chair.

“We understand that this is asking a lot from you all,” she said. “And we really, really appreciate the work you’ll be doing. It’s going to be a little rough at first, know that we know this, but just do your best, alright? If you need anything, you just let us know. Or you can let Ryan know and he’ll take care of it.”

Sorry, Ryan?

“Oh, yeah. I found y’all a project director,” Mr. Stark remembered. Ms. Potts gave him a narrow-eyed look which said that this was supposed to have been brought up earlier.

Peter certainly would have appreciated it coming up earlier.

“Let me go grab him,” Mr. Stark said. He stepped out to make the call.

“Ryan set up the tech clinic in Brooklyn,” Ms. Potts told them comfortingly, “He’s got experience with this kind of thing. He agreed to oversee the project until it gets off the ground.”

Peter looked at Saanvi and Himani and they looked back. A project director would be helpful, especially since none of the six of them knew what the fuck they were doing. This could be a good thing. A very good thing.

 

 

Ryan looked exactly like the kind of guy who wandered through Brooklyn, talking about how he’d had the _best_ curry at this new Asian fusion chain that had just opened up.

He looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be a lumberjack or a Steampunk cosplayer. Like he bought custom rings listed in the ‘rustic jewelry for men’ section of Etsy.

A dick.

He looked like a dick.

If Peter saw him and his lumberjack, craft-beer-brewing friends in a bar, he’d leave to go to the one next door.

Hipsters.

Tall. White. Beardy hipsters.

From _Texas._

Saanvi asked him later if he’d seen the guy’s boat shoes, but Peter hadn’t because he’d been too busy focusing on his gauges and eyebrow piercing.

“Maybe he’s not so bad?” Bo tried, as though this man had not misgendered them twice in a fifteen minute meeting, during which Ryan claimed that he wanted to get to know each of them personally to talk about their individual needs as coordinators.

Leo was not sold. Avery said that he looked just like this guy she’d had a crush on in college who had gone on to become a professional scam artist.

Himani told them all that they needed to make a backup plan in case this man was exactly what he appeared to be, and it was agreed that Ryan would be given the benefit of the doubt for the first month of their acquaintance. After that, should his performance still be found lacking, he would be systematically fed to the wolves.

They were lab managers, not project managers. They still had a wide berth of petty they were expected to operate within.

 

 

When the others packed it in and collected the usual crowd for Friday drinks at the end of the day, Peter begged off like he always did, to the continued disappointment of the research staff and the one or two interns old enough to join them. They had evidently heard tales of Peter’s drunk alter-ego, Fun Peter. Only the other lab managers and one or two veteran staff were acquainted with Fun Peter.

And that was on purpose because Fun Peter sometimes lost count of how many drinks he had, and one time, the bio department managers counted for him. It was an instance never to be repeated because normal people could not safely consume two handles of any hard liquor and awe, amazement, and suspicion were neighbors in this city.

No, if Peter wanted to get drunk, he’d drink at home with MJ so that they would both inevitably end up crying over shit movies and calling Ned to try to get him to understand and appreciate their many, collective repressed feelings.

And if he really, _really_ wanted to get fucked up, he could go hang with Wade and Cable and Dom or Jessica Jones and Karen Page to ultimately be reminded that he was but a tadpole in a pond of older, mostly functional, potentially cannibalistic alcoholics.

In short, Peter had a life outside of work in a way which most of the others didn’t. And he had plans that night which involved a mask and some _very_ persistent, recently-released robbers.

 

 

He got in just before dawn and crashed into bed to sleep it off. His knuckles hurt. So did his abs.

The no pistol whipping rule hadn’t gone down well. It required a bit of a struggle to be enforced.

He’d slept what felt like two seconds when someone buzzed up to his door. He hated them. He turned over and dug into the covers. The door buzzed again and again. Then his phone buzzed instead.

Fuck you, he told it.

It stopped buzzing. He closed his eyes.

It started buzzing again.

He snatched it off the bedside table.

“Someone better be dying,” he growled.

“Get downstairs, loser,” MJ’s voice said in his ear, “We gotta get Ned from the airport.”

 

 

Ned had been off up and down the west coast for most of the month on an assignment which he could tell no one anything about, but Peter and MJ were used to that by now. What they weren’t used to and would never be used to was his lack of presence in between them always.

Ned told them that they were needy.

Peter maintained that he was not _needy_ , he was clingy. There was a difference.

MJ said damn right she was needy. And she had opinions on Peter’s ability to meet these needs which consisted almost entirely of lies and slander.

Regardless, she and Peter pretended to be normal people on the train and then pretended to be normal people waiting for their friend right up until Ned made it through the arrivals gate. Then they were no longer required to be normal people because Ned was present to fill that role.

He dutifully endured the double-suffocation with awkward luggage in hand and then announced that he was ready to sleep a week in one place. Peter promised him that he would be allowed to before MJ could, and this done, they made the trek over to Ned’s place to pin him down and initiate a puppy pile for an hour before it was declared lunch time. At this, they all vacated Ned’s living room for poké and weird veggie juice.

Then, before Peter knew it, it was Spiderman time again and he had an axe to grind with these fucking burglars.

And then it was morning again and there were groceries which had to be bought, Neds which had to be laid on, MJs who needed attention and one Little Spidey reporting in that Miles was refusing to give up any more information about his so-called club which made it very suspicious indeed. She promised she’d keep up the pressure until he cracked and Peter told her she was doing a fantastic job.

 

 

Monday came too soon. And not just because he didn’t want the triumph of his burglar victory to end.

It came with the realization that, hoo boy.

It was moving day.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> y'all, Himani is the voice in my head which drives all my academic and professional decisions.


	3. creaky pipes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We shouldn’t even be here. This place is probably a squatter cemetery."

He got to SI just in time to meet the moving trucks as they pulled in to the loading bay. He knew the guys behind the wheels by then. Josh and Jerry. They were institutions in their own right; seemed to have been moving shit for SI since the dawn of time. Jerry was a staunchly conservative guy who lived his life grumbling about the pansy, snowflake tendencies of his employers. He’d told Peter on multiple occasions that if either of his kids was ‘held hostage’ by a position in an institution such as theirs, he’d go ‘Frank Castle’ on the whole damn building.

Jerry thought that the Punisher was all that was right in America. He was very proud that he and the guy had a similarly strong old-school Queens accent.

Peter daydreamed sometimes about telling him that Frank Castle was, at heart, a flagrant hippie trapped in an armored tank. Castle thought that Montessori schools were the cream of the crop in pre-school education and, according to Karen Page, was currently _obsessed_ with the zero-waste Youtube gals. He’d become That Guy who brought his own jars with him to grocery stores in their image.

Peter tried not to talk to Jerry if he could help it.

The guy gave him a curt wave as he ducked into the building from the back, though, and Josh, the polar opposite of Jerry in every way humanly possible, gave Peter a huge smile and a friendly hello at the sign-out desk.

 

 

The lab was a box of cats by the time Peter got upstairs. Folks all over, kicking up dust and stacking and labeling boxes. He passed by Himani directing two of her interns—the ones who they all suspected were joined at the hip—to wrap all glassware in newspaper before putting them into the waiting boxes.

Most of Peter’s crew wasn’t there yet, probably waiting down in the security line in the atrium. He’d told them to come around the back way in the morning, had sent an email out the night before, but alas. Anyone in the lab under the age of 26, he knew from his teaching days, would die if they read more than the first three lines of any email.

As such, he had exactly one-fourth of his twelve man team present. They were his trouble-trio. Lovett, Alvarez, and Wallace. He was, at the moment, avoiding Lovett and Alvarez like his life depended on it. Rescue two gals from a load of shitheads by the docks and the next thing you know, all they got for you are questions. That you couldn’t answer, obviously. Because who the hell is Spiderman, anyways?

The trouble-trio that morning, however, was thankfully groggy; they offered him coffee in lieu of a hello. He held up the cup he’d picked up on the way in greeting.

 

 

Loading the shit into the trucks wasn’t the hard part; the hard part was getting everyone to take the damn train together without them all looking like a bunch of schmucks. Their labcoats were pretty fucking obnoxious, but they couldn’t afford for people to take them off because the lab managers had to keep doing head counts to ensure that they hadn’t lost anybody. The whole thing felt like some kind of grown-up school field trip.

Someone on the car they crowded into took a panorama picture of them all. No doubt to post on Instagram with some snippy comment about Stark Industries not providing transit for its workers. Peter sighed, stared at the ceiling, and started counting stops.

 

 

When once again above ground, it became immediately and unfortunately clear that someone had gotten left after all. One of Bo and Avery’s kids; Bo stepped away to try to explain the subway system to this recent Midwestern migrant who was, no doubt, crying on the other end of the line. Bo headed back to meet this poor soul and the rest of them soldiered forwards toward the college. Ryan was allegedly already at the facility.

“I’ve never been in this part of Queens before,” Bautista bubbled at Peter’s side on the way.

Peter hummed.

“It’s fine, I guess,” he said. “I grew up west of here.”

“No way!”

“Why else you think I agreed to this? Commute’s shorter.”

“Wait, so you live nearby??”

Aw, shit. He had his whole team’s attention now.

“None of y’all are coming to my house,” he snapped to disappointed groans.

 

 

The building was.

Well.

Not _exactly_ what Peter had been dreading, but you know. Close enough.

Brutalist architecture. Ominous cracks in the outer walls. Covered in streams of multicolored algae which stained the sides of the building red and green and mustard yellow. There were two concrete planters set across from each other in front of the place’s entrance. Both were filled with dead foliage and one was half-swallowed by tendrils of ivy which had snuck over from the neighboring flower beds. The entrance was a set a of old double doors with tinted glass. The frontside of the glass was taped over in caution tape. A lock, with its hole filled with water, had been lovingly draped on a thick chain which itself had been threaded between the doors’ handles.

On the other side of the tinted glass was a charming view of the rotting sheets of wood used to board up the entrance from the inside.

Somehow, just standing staring at the lock, Peter already knew what the inside was going to smell like.

Must and dust and damp.

“This is…charming,” Saanvi said.

Girl.

“How do we get in?” Himani asked. She tried to pull at the lock, but it was steadfastly rusted in place. Peter thought that she might have been the first one to touch it in years. He took a few steps back and stared up at the building’s windows. A few of them on the second floor looked like they’d been opened.

Ryan maybe?

“Maybe we need to go around?” Leo thought out loud.

Around to where?

“Well, there’s gotta be a back, doesn’t there? Someone call Ryan, maybe he can let us in?”

Himani called. Ryan didn’t pick up. The staff started murmuring and clustering together. Saanvi tried next, but still no answer.

“Well, fuck,” she said, “What’re we supposed to do? We’ve got the trucks coming.”

Well. Peter had a solution. He had multiple solutions actually, none of which any of these folks could see, especially not in daylight.

“Guess we’re gonna have to break in,” Leo said.

“Break in? It’s our first day and we’re already committing a felony?” Avery asked.

“Misdemeanor,” Peter corrected before he could stop himself. He abruptly realized everyone was staring at him. “Usually a misdemeanor,” he repeated. “Unless you plan to steal shit or you’ve got a weapon.”

More silence.

“We’re leaving that,” Saanvi decided for everybody. She tried to call Ryan again, then again, but finally on the third go, with everyone’s eyes on her, she sighed and gave up.

“Anyone know how to break into a building?” she said, defeated.

Peter slowly raised his hand.

“Dude, what the fuck?”

 

 

He told people to see if they couldn’t find a fence or something like it.

He didn’t need a fence to get to the open second-story windows, but he needed a boost so as not to out himself to all 50-odd persons on the team at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning. A fence was not found, but, thankfully, Himani was a great sport. She found a fire-escape and turned to Peter with determination in her face before hunkering down into a crouch.

“Climb on my back and grab that,” she instructed, waving at the end of the ladder.

Peter chewed his lip.

Himani was the size of a large bug on a good day. He was not putting even half of his weight on her back, not even if God himself told him to.

“Why don’t we do this the other way?” he negotiated.

“Don’t worry, I got this,” Himani said proudly, already all tucked into herself under the escape. Peter heard people behind him covering their faces so as not to burst out laughing at her.

“Girl, for real. Here, just climb on my shoulders,” he said.

Himani popped back up with huge eyes like her greatest dream was about to come true.

“Are you sure?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Oh my god. Oh my god—LEO. PARKER’S GONNA LET ME RIDE HIM.”

Peter almost whimpered in despair. He’d walked right into that one. He could already hear Alvarez and Lovett turning this into a chant. He did not need them to make any more chants. They already had so many chants.

“Hold on,” Leo called, “I wanna film it.”

“YOU KINKY BITCH,” Himani screeched back.

What had he done to deserve this?

 

 

Himani was very proud of herself for getting the ladder down. Peter had never seen her happier. She struggled to get off his shoulders and he had half a mind to leave her there to be jostled and to think about what she’d fucking done. But alas. They had actual problems to solve.

Such as determining whether their fire-escape was weight bearing.

“I dunno,” Saanvi said, side-eyeing it, “Seems pretty sketch to me.”

Ehn. Probably.

“I got this,” he said before anyone else could sacrifice themselves. He wouldn’t fall, he could guarantee that much.

And he didn’t. It was easy enough to climb the nasty-ass, pigeon-shit coated rungs up to the first story window. And then it was a piece of cake to climb the next set of rungs, right into the pigeon nest itself. Then: wham, open window. Entrance located.

The room inside was old. Huge blocky tables with sinks dug into their centers and ends. Bunsen burners from like, the 70s. He carefully brought a foot onto the window sill and leaned in to see more of the place. It was dark. The only light came from the window he was standing in, the others had moth-eaten shades over them. Tiny fragments of light showed through them.

“Peter, be careful,” Someone outside called.

He brought his other foot in and placed it tentatively on the floor.

It did not fall in.

Excellent. Building foundation: mostly func—

 

 

Building foundation: hazardous.

Peter levered himself up onto his elbows and shook his head. He looked straight up at the remnants of a boarded up hole in the ceiling. Some nasty-ass plaster took the opportunity to trickle down onto his face.

Well, so much for viable.

He was glad they’d brought the hard hats.

 

 

The front entrance was locked from the outside and the new window-access was a fucking death trap, so Peter ended up going from room to room on the ground floor, yanking at ancient, rusted windows until one of them screeched open. When he finally found one, he leaned out and found himself a good 120 yards from the crowd of people staring up at the second story window he’d climbed through to begin with.

He whistled. The crowded turned his way and then hurried over.

He held lots of hands to steady folks coming in through the window while Leo on the other side helped those who couldn’t easily hop up get through.

It was an adventure and they’d only just gotten there.

 

 

“So this sucks,” Avery said for everyone as they all stood in the lobby and stared up at the mold crawling its way across the ceiling. Jackson Pollock had nothing on it. It bloomed and crusted in swirls and blobs around cloudy, water-filled light fixtures from the locked west entrance to the equally locked east entrance. There was an abandoned mop sitting in a yellow cart leaned up against one of the room’s corners. The furniture looked like that of a doctor’s office, except these chairs and couches were 100% guaranteed to be filled with vermin and soaked through from the humidity.

“We’re supposed to make a lab out of this?” the interns started whispering to each other.

There was a clicking noise and everyone shut the fuck up.

Click. Click. Click.

What the fuck was that? Sounded like water dripping onto a carpet.

Click. Click. Click.

“This place is fucking haunted,” Himani whimpered.

Yeah, no. Absolutely.

Click. Click. Click.

“Guys, it’s the fucking blinds,” Leo sighed. And it was. The handle from the blinds rattled against them in the first breeze it had felt in probably decades. The relief in the room was palpable.

“Okay,” Saanvi said to herself, but also the group, “This looks bad. But it can’t be that bad. Mr. Stark wouldn’t have—”

Chaos briefly burst out when an honest-to-god _bat_ blustered from a corner of the room out the open window.

“I CAN’T,” Himani wheezed.

Peter agreed.

“This is insane.”

Yes, it was.

“We shouldn’t even be here. This place is probably a squatter cemetery.”

“Why, hello!”

Peter almost died. Ten years of Spiderman, of actually throwing himself off buildings and into traffic and Ryan was going to be the thing that killed him. God. What a life.

Ryan laughed at everyone’s panic. He was wearing no labcoat and all of his many bracelets were on full display. He wiped at his eyes when he was through cackling and then stood tall and proud with his hands on his hips and a smile on his face.

“What do y’all think of the new digs, then?” he asked.

No one said anything. No one dared. He was smiling. Why was he smiling?

“They’re…lacking,” Saanvi finally said diplomatically. Ryan laughed again.

“Yeah, they’re pretty grim,” he decided. “But have no fear! We can make this work.”

Could they? Could they really? Also, sir, where the hell have you been?

“The trucks are around back. Everyone follow me,” Ryan said and turned around to walk down what could only be a cursed hallway between the two entrances on the sides of the lobby. Avery watched him go and clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Himani shook her head lightly as though she was trying to wake up from a dream.

The spidey sense started humming in the back of Peter’s neck.

 

 

Because the interns and half the research staff were convinced that the place was haunted and because the other half had the goddamn sense to refuse to work in the place until it was up to code, Peter and the other lab managers found themselves doing more managing than they had anticipated on the first day.

They had to divide everyone up into groups to go through and check all the rooms to compile a safety report. Each room on every floor needed a risk assessment and that would have been fine if Peter was not now aware that some of those rooms on some of those floors had impromptu easy-exits in them. Also known as holes in the floors, but hey, you say tomato, he said ‘Jesus fuck, be careful where you step—everyone hold onto your buddy at all times.’

So he and Saavni and Bo and Ave were handling that while Leo and Himani handled getting all of the shit in the trucks out of the trucks and into the building. Did they want this highly fragile, potentially hazardous material in the crumbling, brutalist wasteland they now found themselves in? No. Did they have a choice? Not at the present.

Peter passed by the un-loading team working with slightly desperate optimism on his way to pick up two boxes of hardhats for his group of adventurers. He wished he’d gotten the ones with lights on them now. Floor two had no power.

 

 

The following two hours were extremely insightful. Peter learned many things which boiled down to: the even numbered floors had no power, the odd numbered floors had no working water, there was a stunning lack of fire doors, and an even more stunning number of unnecessary walls. The place felt crowded with tabletops, but there weren’t enough outlets to set up a computer lab in any one room. The outlets that did work were so old that Peter didn’t want to chance plugging in any device made in the last ten years on the off-chance it caused the whole floor to short-circuit.

In terms of storage space, they were looking at lots of rooms with lots of cabinets, which was good, but they were also looking at many of those cabinets being filled with forgotten materials and bottles of ancient chemicals and specimens.

Just in general, the place was in bad repair. The flooring throughout the building was nasty and mold and water had seeped through it. Uncontained flooding from faulty water pipes and lack of maintenance had weakened ceilings and the concrete and wood between floors. About 75% of the windows in the place were rusted shut in some way or another. Sinks were full of rat droppings and dust and bits of plaster from cracking and sunken ceilings. There were vermin everywhere, of all kinds.

On the upside, they had adopted a resident raccoon and her brood as lab mascots.

On the upside, the place was mostly still standing.

On the upside, with some _serious_ construction, love, and attention, Peter could see the place transformed into a pretty good lab.

If a few walls were taken out on every floor and the space opened up a bit, there would be plenty of room for collaborative spaces. If walls were brought down between lab spaces, then there would be more room than they had at the Stark facility to increase the scale of projects. The basement, although filthy, was solid and would be good for some of the more violent and explosive developments which needed to be tested.

The very top of the building led out into an atrium space. Beautiful, intricate steel and glasswork held up an abandoned and overgrown greenhouse. Besides it just being a nice space to be in, Peter could see it repurposed for some of the AG sustainability projects Mr. Stark had started to work on and support on the side.

Spatially, it was good. Situationally, it was good.

Practically and temporally, it was a nightmare.

Ryan jokingly called it one giant DIY project, but Peter wasn’t laughing. He hadn’t seen Ryan at all, all day. Peter was over here with little Bautista clinging to his arm, begging him not to step further into a room out of fear he’d go right through the floor again, and where the fuck had Ryan been?

Couldn’t he see that this was a health and safety lawsuit waiting to happen? Did he not understand that they were all taking huge risks here, just doing the damn risk assessment forms?

They weren’t construction workers. They weren’t architects. They were a bunch of scientists in hard hats. They were paid to use their brains more than their hands and even if they had agreed to turn the place into a lab, it was above their paygrade to be making decisions to knock down walls and shit.

And where had Ryan been throughout all this?

No one knew. Himani and Leo hadn’t seen him downstairs and neither Bo or Ave had seen him on their floors. Peter and Saanvi certainly hadn’t seen him.

Saanvi said that he must have been doing paperwork or checking the equipment in the basement. Peter almost asked just to be sure, but decided against it. A month, they’d said they’d give him. And so a month, he damn well would.

 

 

Six hours of oscillating between terror and disgust had passed by the time they all decided to call it a day. It was getting dark and the lobby didn’t have power. Bautista and Lawrence begged Peter to be allowed to call a priest. He didn’t have it in his heart to tell them no, but he also didn’t exactly know how to bring it up to the others. He promised them he’d talk to Ryan about it. He also promised them that they didn’t have to stay there, they could request reassignment back at SI.

“No!” Bautista barked for both her and Lawrence, “We’re on your team. We’ll stay on your team, right, Ray?”

Lawrence bobbed his head as hard as his delicate neck would allow him to.

Aw.

Babies.

Peter was touched. He was also the one who everyone suddenly turned to for bar recommendations.

“Sorry, what?” he asked the masses.

“We’ve earned a drink, Pete. You live around here, don’t you?” Ave pointed out.

“No, man. I live—wait a second here, nice try, you little shits.” The managers and staff snickered at him. He gave them a threatening finger, “No one is coming to my fuckin’ house, alright? Y’all are obsessed. It’s weird.”

“Dude, your office is crazy, we _need_ to see how you live, unbridled,” Bo said.

His office was not crazy. His office was full of perfectly reasonable things. Talismans. Stones. Plants and post-it notes.

“My home is a sanctuary for me to escape you guys,” Peter said. “And anyways, just go back to Manhattan if you want to drink.”

There was a thoughtful pause.

“I know a place in Forest Hills,” someone piped up from the back.

God, no. No, no, no. He just wanted to go home in peace. He just wanted to go lay on Ned and bitch about the insanity and unfairness of it all while getting hair pets.

“There’s nothing in Forest Hills,” he lied, “Just go up to Flushing. Hella stuff there.”

There was another thoughtful pause among the others standing outside at their new gate.

“Do you live in Forest Hills, Parker?” Lovett needled at his right.

The goddamn brains on these people, man.

“No,” he said tightly, “I live in hell. And y’all need to mind your own damn business. I’m out. Peace.”

“YOU DO.”

“I don’t. Bye!”

“We’re coming with you!”

“No, you aren’t.”

“Why are you running then?”

“I’m not running!”

 

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Discontinued

Hey everyone,

 

This story will be discontinued.

 

I'm not actually too sorry about this because I feel that it is what is best for the series. But I'm also not sorry about it because I must say that some of y'all in the comments have been very discouraging.

Like. In a way that I have very, very rarely experienced on my other fics.

I get that a lot of this probably comes from a place of excitement, but pointing out plotholes and arguing with me about character behavior before a fic has even gotten into the meat of the plot really makes me not want to write it. Basically, between that and having to constantly rewrite my drafts and generally just not having fun anymore, I'm no longer interested in carrying on writing this one and I'm not gonna sit here and force the work to do something it doesn't want to do.

Anyways, thanks very much to those of you who were very supportive. I appreciate you guys for encouraging me to keep going.

 

Peace,

Matt

 

 


End file.
